Paintings By Ken Gorcyzca
Storied By Scott Eberle
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Arnold van Gennep, the Belgian anthropologist who first coined the term “rite of passage” in 1907, identified three phases of this kind of life transition. Common language used at the School of Lost Borders for the three are
severance, threshold and incorporation
.
Severance:
the ending of the old phase of life.
Threshold:
the time between the old and the new.
Incorporation:
the start of the new life.
Another way of saying: the dying, the in-between, and the rebirth.
On a recent desert fast with the School, one of our participants, Ken Gorcyzca, did several paintings that help bring alive this journey from the old into the new.
Ken is a self-taught artist who paints plein-air portraiture of wilderness and nature. As you’ll see below, he captures Earth’s spirit and emotions through moments of serenity, shadow, color and movement as mirrored though his personal self-reflection and dreamtime.
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Ken’s fast was held at Hole in the Wall: a remarkable gap in a long wall of rock, hundreds of feet high, that lies in the Death Valley backcountry 5 or 6 miles east of Furnace Creek. Over thousands of years, a valley four miles across has sent all its water toward this low point, and there water and desert winds eventually eroded through this great rock creating Hole in the Wall.
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Ken completed this painting before starting his solo at a spot near our basecamp. This perspective is the same as all the paintings to follow: it looks back through Hole in the Wall, toward the backcountry road that leads onto Furnace Creek and then to the civilized world. ‘Paradise”, his painting seems to suggest, may lie back at home, on the other side of this Hole in Wall, but only if he first does the hard work of a desert fast.
In dying to what no longer will serve him, he might then be reborn anew in the new life to come. But first must do the hard work. As we often say at the School:
This ceremony won’t make your life easier,
but it will make it more authentic.
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An old Mayan teaching about how to prepare for a dying—be it physical or symbolic—begins with a person stepping onto “Decision Road”: making a commitment to do this dying as consciously as possible.
Ken made this painting from a high promontory on the far side of the valley, looking back down toward our basecamp and, just beyond that, Hole in the Wall. This was done on the first day of the fast. He’s looking at the pathway that took him to this solo spot: first on a backcountry road leading through Hole in the Wall, then to our basecamp, and then along the light brown “Decision Road” he walked to his spot. The vibrant purples of the canvas make the desert shadows come alive, even as he’s approaching the dying soon to come.
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Day two of the fast
: This day, Ken was too focused on the inner work of preparing to die to do a painting. This was the day he did his “Death Lodge”: the second step in the Mayan teaching about how to die.
The Death Lodge is a place where a person can do the hard work of forgiveness and healing in wounded relationships, or offer love
and gratitude where possible. All that is in preparation for saying as clean a goodbye to the old life as possible. Not all this relationship work may be completed on one single fast, but what is done allows for a cleaner entry into the world of humans when rebirth does come.
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Last Picture Before Death
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On this fast, participants were invited to imagine that their dying would happen on the third night—consciously while awake or when sleeping. A vigil on this third night was an opportunity to take the third step in the Mayan teaching: creating a “Purpose Circle”, also called “The Circle of Self”.
This ceremony is a time to do one last life review and to make peace
with the successes and failures that have preceded this moment. More of the work necessary to create a new clean beginning upon rebirth.
On this, while prepping for the third night of the fast, Ken painted the same panorama as on the first day, but the story now is so different. The valley before him still has a little color, some purples and greens and yellows—signs that there’s still a little life left. But it’s the swirling grays, whites and blacks of the sky that tell the truer story:
death is coming soon.
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Ken’s name for the next painting is borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism. In this cosmology, a person who has died must journey for 49 days before being reborn into a new life.
This place of “In Between” is the fourth stage of the Mayan teaching, though in the Tibetan world, the in-between is called the Bardos. Both monsters and allies may appear on this journey from old into new, so the challenge becomes keeping still and true to your own essential self, so you might be reborn into a higher realm.
This painting was done during the fourth day of Ken’s fast, the transition time between dying on the third night and being reborn at sunrise on the fifth morning. Monsters and allies may come, but in his painting, the world is vibrant and bright. The stars sparkle during daylight, and the mountain walls become alive with deathbed figures. The abstract quality of this rendering suggests just how otherworldly this in-between place can be.
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We return to where we began: heading through the Gates of Paradise. Ken wrote to me after the fast that this painting could easily be placed before those completed during his solo or after, as all of his time in the desert was preparation for passing through this gateway back to his home.
And so I return to the saying so commonly spoken at the School: “This ceremony won’t make your life easier, but it will make it more authentic.”
But to that I now add: But if you do this ceremonial work well enough, often enough, you’ll bring your authentic inner self
into alignment with how you live out in the world. With that, your life will get easier. That would be one definition of “paradise”.
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School of Lost Borders / 760-938-3333 / [email protected] www.schooloflostborders.org
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